The Open Sourcerer

Here’s another BIG announcement furthering the onward march of Open Source on the desktop:

Lenovo and Novell today announced an agreement to provide preloaded Linux* on Lenovo ThinkPad notebook PCs and to provide support from Lenovo for the operating system. The companies will offer SUSE® Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 from Novell® to commercial customers on Lenovo notebooks including those in the popular ThinkPad T Series, a class of notebooks aimed at typical business users, beginning in the fourth quarter of 2007. The ThinkPad notebooks with the Linux-preload will also be available for purchase by individual customers.

There are two big things with this announcement:

1. Novell’s SLED is enterprise software aimed at business users. This is different (rather than either better or worse) to the Dell/Ubuntu deal which is far more consumer focussed. This move just adds even more credence to the whole idea that Linux and Open Source are ready for prime-time.
2. If Lenovo AND Dell start banging the table of their hardware suppliers for better [and preferably Open Source] drivers, then the whole Open Source community will benefit in long run.

Overall another great news story for Open Source. Here’s the press release in full.

Tags: Linux, Novell, Open Source

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 22:46 by Alan Lord and is filed under FLOSS in the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.